MAH-JONGG AND OTHER STORIES

Well, my class of 14 Korean middle-school EFL teachers left Saturday, freeing up,I hope, immense time slots in my weeks unil this term ends March 13.

A few weekends ago, an old U-of-I (Illinois) colleague who I used to jam with (me on piano, he and another teacher on guitars) and now lives in Phoenix invited me to go along with his son and him and another co-worker to hike in the Superstition Mountains just east of the city.



It's been an unusually wet year, so the "desert" was carpeted with green in all directions. (To an ex-Saudi Aramco Brat, it hardly qualifies as REAL desert!) Large saguaro cacti - a forest of them - headed up the slopes of the mountain. Weather's been cool, so we started out early morning with jackets and stripped down layer by layer as it got closer to high noon with its ... 75 degrees! Here are a few photos:







Last weekend, I was invited to the apartment of a Chinese student of mine from Manchuria (Harbin) in gratitude for several sessions helping her get her application ready for the Master's in Comparative Literature here at ASU. She was maddeningly blase about the deadline (innocently, I believe), so I was trying to canjole and coerce as politely as I could to make sure she had at least SOMETHING in to the department by the February 1 due date.

She lives with her older brother, a chemistry lecturer at ASU, in a pleasant apartment. He startleed me by saying some very positive things about the banned Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama - surely inviting a court appearance if said back home! (The brother seems to be a devout Buddhist). And for propriety's sake, she had invited several others as well. After hearty helpings of Chinese home cooking, they brought out the mah-jongg tiles, and proceded to teach me and one other American undergrad the rules of the game. It was fun, and me any my partner Shu-Min actually won a few times! Nice to know ageing dogs can still learn new tricks!

CONFERENCE UPDATE

One of my big goals this spring has been (a) to get my conference proposals accepted and (b) get permission to attend the conferences - even AECP funding if I'm presenting. And ... both of my proposals have been accepted now, so I'll be presenting here at ASU March 14 and at CATESOL (California TESOL) on April 18.

The good news today (after a fairly sharp disappoinment several weeks back when my boss refused my request for one Friday leave without pay to attend the TESOL conference for the ESL field in Denver March 26) was that after reconsideration by the Professional Development Committee, I can now be absent that Friday to attend the conference. (One committee member told me privately he was totally puzzled why Mark would turn down a reasonable request by the outfit's only PhD to attend THE professional conference in our field.)

Since the first "meeting" with my boss, ASU has been upended by a budget crisis which has forced the president to require all faculty and staff to take "furlough" days off without pay - one day per month of contract. Since I teach 9 months according to my contract, I (and other AECP teachers) must take 9 days furlough. Problem is, we teach every day, so there really aren't any "office" days that we can conveniently not come in to work.

Where to get the 9 days? Our poor director, Mark, has had to play this all by ear in our very atypical unit at ASU, and so at the moment (this is changing from day to day) we'll have one day required furlough Feb. 18, when our students go on a Grand Canyon trip, and the five days for our normal Spring Break March 16-20, plus one day we choose ourselves. Conveniently for me, my original TESOL Friday request now fits neatly into the "furlough" system, so it's kind of hard to deny me that under the circumstances!

That adds up to 7 furlough days. 2 left. Hmmm. Wonder where those will be coming from?

Mark also promised to try to come up with funding (at least conference fees) for the CATESOL conference in Pasadena. I'm not too hopeful given the dire economic straits of ASU currently, but every little bit (even good intentions) helps!